(Copying this discussion from Wikimedia-l to the more specific email list Wikidata-l.)
Hi Vahid, if you don't get answers to your remaining questions on Wikidata-l then I suggest asking on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat. Even if there was not an external project involved, there probably are people who are interested in data quality and language accessibility including Arabic translations, and who may be willing to assist.
Regards, Pine🌲
On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 12:11 PM Lydia Pintscher via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Vahid,
On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 8:05 PM Vahid Shaik via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi all,
I run an Arabic-first prayer-times site (https://waqtazan.com). It is
not a
Wikimedia project, but it leans on open geodata, and I have hit a gap I suspect this community knows more about than I do.
Great to hear!
We publish one server-rendered page per city, in Arabic. Our rule is
that a
city ships only if it has a verified Arabic name — we never machine- transliterate one, because a wrong place name in Arabic is worse than an absent city. That rule is expensive: a large share of our live names
still
fall back to GeoNames, which is inconsistent for Arabic, and cities
without
a trustworthy name are simply excluded.
Wikidata is the obvious candidate source. Before I lean on it, three questions:
How reliable are Wikidata `ar` labels for settlements in practice? My worry is that many are bot-imported transliterations rather than the endonym a local reader would recognise. Is there a way to tell the two apart at scale?
Labels are CC0, so there is no legal attribution duty. But what is the community norm for a project reusing them at this scale? I would
rather
over-credit than under-credit, and I would like to do it the way the movement expects.
Please see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access#Data_best_practices for an answer to this.
- Is anyone already working on Arabic labels for settlements outside the Arab world — Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, West Africa? That is exactly where our coverage thins out, and if there is an existing effort I
would
rather contribute to it than duplicate it.
Happy to be told I am framing any of this wrong.
Thanks, Vahid https://waqtazan.com
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - https://lydiapintscher.de - WD:Q18016466 Portfolio Lead for Wikidata
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